Parental guidance

12:01AM BST 31 Aug 2002

Not everyone will welcome the film censor's decision to let parents of children under the age of 12 decide what they can watch in the cinema. With films tending to include ever more violence, sex and bad language, some will see the decision as a backward step.

Young children, the argument will go, are in need of a firmer not a weaker hand from the British Board of Film Classification. But, as a spokesman for the board remarks, 12-year-olds develop faster today than they did and know what is going on in the world. Only parents can tell what stage they have reached. Under a voluntary agreement (which will need watching) cinema chains and film distributors will print advice on posters and press listings.

There can surely be nothing wrong in restoring to parents, from the hand of the state as it were, a degree more responsibility for their younger children. The recent trend has been rather too much in the opposite direction.

Parents expect schools, the health service and other public sources to provide for their children what was once the prerogative of the home. True, films, television, videos, to say nothing of the internet, today expose young children to sights and sounds that would have shocked the last generation. That makes it a good moment to remind parents of duties they can perform better than anyone else.